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Long before the litigation ended Sarsfield was a tired and worried old man; he began to contradict himself in evidence and as the costs mounted up he realised that if he did not win the case he would be ruined and just as probably, too, if he did win it. As the result of newspaper reports of the case a Mrs Rossborough, of 4, Portland Row, Dublin, wrote to him introducing herself as his niece, the daughter of his late brother the chief justice, and saying that she had been informed that she was probably the heir-at-law to the late Caesar. Her husband John Thomas Rossborough was a man of considerable wealth and the Rossboroughs were certainly in a better position to litigate than Sarsfield, so agreement was reached that he should withdraw from the case and if they were successful would share the profits with him. They were successful but by the time of the final judgement in the House of Lords Sarsfield was dead and the costs of fifteen years of litigation had taken all the Rossborough money and the whole value of the Tintern Estates as well. Before moving into Tintern they had to mortgage every acre of the Tintern lands to cover their costs- rather surprisingly Jane's aunt Lady Aldborough lent the Rossboroughs £100,000 on one mortgage- and when Miss Biddulph-Colclough died in 1983 it was found that the estate was still having to pay interest on some of these mortgages which had never been redeemed.
When Caesar left England to take up his appointment in Prince Edward Island he had given Sarsfield a power of attorney to act for him, but had made no mention of having been married. Mrs Rossborough stated that her mother was Susan, daughter of James Leach of St. James's, a former Master of the Rolls, and that her parents had been married on 27 October 1804 by the Reverend Thomas O'Meara. Solicitors had searches made in all the London church registers but no record could be found of any such wedding nor of the Reverend Thomas O'Meara or James Leach of St James's. The suggestion was then made that the wedding might have taken place in Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland and a solicitor was sent to those places to search, but without success. By an odd coincidence 27 October 1804 was the date of a letter which the chief-justice-to-be had sent to Sarsfield saying that he was " as much distressed as a man could be" and asking for a loan of money, and in 1806 he had written to say he had "only one seven-shilling piece in the world". The only evidence which she could produce to suggest that her parents might have been married was a congratulatory address presented to them on their departure from Prince Edward Island which referred to "your amiable lady and family." While Jane's counsel was cross-examining Mrs Rossborough on this her own pushed a note to him saying that if the matter were carried any further he would put Vesey's Port Patrick marriage in issue. The matter was dropped immediately and in the years of litigation which ensued nothing was said of the legitimacy of either party and the court had to accept the guidance of the maxim "omnia rite ac solemniter esse acta." From a historical point of view it is unfortunate that the Rosboroughs had not considered Sir Vesey's questionable legitimacy - had they done so another 100 years of documents might have been written into the court records! Whilst the contestants struggled over their prey they were in constant dread that it might be whisked from under their noses by a little jackal in the person of the infant Matilda, the Rev. Dudley's grand-daughter.
Caesar the barrister is generally referred to as 'eminent' and 'intrepid'. Eminent, for are not all lawyers eminent? Intrepid? Briefless barristers on the Leinster circuit would race one another from one assize town to the next in the hope of getting dock briefs worth a guinea a time. On one occasion the river at Ballinlaw was in spate and those bound for Wexford assizes made a lengthy diversion to find a safer route but Caesar who was in desperate need of guineas persuaded the ferrymen to carry him across and so inspired a colleague, Bushe, who afterwards became Lord Justice of the Common Pleas, to declaim:-
Whilst meaner souls the tempest strikes with awe
Intrepid Colclough crosses Ballinlaw
And cries to boatmen shivering in their rags
You carry Caesar and his saddle bags.
Ever after Caesar was 'intrepid Colclough'.
His practise at the bar did not bring him in a living but he had a small allowance from his father. He tried to supplement his resources and curry favour with the authorities with a view to an appointment of some kind by acting as a Dublin Castle informer. Prior to the outbreak of the rebellion of 1798 he kept up an incessant flow of reports to the Castle which seemed to have been accurate, level-headed and of greater value than those of most of his alarmist fellow-reporters. In 1799 with the death of his father and the lease of Duffry Hall being transferred to his younger brother Dudley he no longer had a home or an allowance and being in fear too of vengeance for the part which his reports had played in defeating the 1798 rebellion he left for England and spent the next few years in trying to secure some sort of legal appointment by getting patronage exercised on his behalf and to this end he curried favour with the Duke of Kent and a number of peers. There is no record of where or how he lived during this period but letters from him asking for help in getting an appointment bearing an address in Charing Cross Road are in several of the collections in the Additional Manuscripts in the British Library. His appointment in Prince Edward Island was to replace an army sergeant who, without any sort of legal qualifications, had been performing the functions of Chief (and only) Justice, but only got the pay of an army sergeant for it, and an army sergeant's pay was all that was given to Caesar. In Newfoundland there was trouble with the Chief Justice, Tremlet, who was a bankrupt merchant with no legal qualifications and the £1000 a year which a qualified lawyer would expect was beyond the means of the treasury. Caesar soon made himself unpopular in Prince Edward Island and the suggestion was made that he and Tremlet should exchange appointments, Tremlet getting his sergeant's pay and Caesar getting £500 a year. Complaints about Caesar were as frequent in Newfoundland as they had been in Prince Edward Island- drunkenness, pomposity and cowardice. When a riot broke out amongst drunken fishermen and he was called upon to read the Riot Act he refused to do so on the grounds that his children had measles and he could not leave them. He issued an order that all stray dogs were to be shot and the next morning there was a notice nailed on his door reading "Stray Dog Yourself" This, he said, was a threat to assassinate him which made the performance of his judicial functions impossible and he demanded to be sent home on full pay, to which the Newfoundland government agreed in their relief to be rid of him. The catalogue of his misdeeds and incompetence takes up five pages in Warburton's History of Price Edward Island. He retired to Versailles where he felt safe from any survivors of the 1798 rebellion and from his cousin Caesar and ended his days there in gardening and writing to the influential asking for a further appointment. He died in 1819.
With the judgement in the first case in their favour the Rossboroughs in 1853 moved into Tintern Abbey and by Royal licence adopted the name and arms of Colclough. There were many moves and uncertainties before the final decision of the House of Lords in their favour in 1857 after which they lived very happily in the Abbey until Rossboroughs death in 1869 even though they had no money and were often in straitened circumstances as were their daughters after them. The rule of law in such cases is that 'costs come out of the estate' and to meet the astronomical costs of 15 years of litigation every acre of the estate had to be mortgaged whilst the proper maintenance of the Abbey on top of the mortgage interest left them nothing for their support. Even so, Rossborough ably fulfilled all his inescapable functions as J.P, High Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant and they seem to have been a very popular couple particularly with their tenants.
Their happiness was rudely interrupted in the spring of 1863 by the intrusion of Patrick Sarsfield Colclough, son of the late Sarsfield, armed with four writs of ejectment in respect of both Tintern and the Duffry estates. A claim based on the illegitimacy of Mrs Rossborough would have been fairly straightforward and easy to prove, but this would merely have let in Matilda, which would have been of no use to him. He claimed that his father Sarsfield had been the only legitimate child of Adam of Duffry because under Irish law the offspring of a mixed marriage were deemed illegitimate and he put in affidavits to show that Adam and Mary had frequently changed their religions and that the only time that they happened to coincide was at the birth of Sarsfield who alone, therefore, was legitimate. Burke, in his "Rise of Great Families", dealing with the value of the Office of Arms at Dublin Castle says "Mr.(Rossborough) Colclough was well nigh in despair, but, at the "eleventh hour a clue was discovered in the 'Book of Converts' "in the Office of Arms which led to the required "evidence....and thus finally determined the case." Distressed as the Rossboroughs were by this renewal of litigation, Patrick Sarsfield, who was an undischarged bankrupt, blandly admitted that he had neither the intention nor the means of pursuing the case nor any belief in the justice of his claim but had only brought it in the hopes that the Rossboroughs would give him money to go away.
Patrick Sarsfield described himself merely as 'Gentleman' but how he made a living and managed to support a wife and three children, all of whom predeceased him, is not at all clear. At one time we find him in occupation of the Lands at Nash and being refused the renewal of the lease which had been held by his grandfather, Patrick of Anneville. At another he is in possession of Anneville, and again we find him in occupation of the Blacker family's magnificent mansion, Woodbrook. He did not pay the rent and it took the Blackers seven years to get him out. He seems to have had a penchant for litigation but some of the cases in which he was involved are very difficult to follow. In Swan v. Colclough it was recounted that Graves Chamney had leased lime and gravel workings in Kildavin to Patrick of Anneville on whose death they had passed to his grandson Patrick Sarsfield who in 1826 assigned them to his new-born son Adam. Chamney having died, his personal representative Swan brought an action against Adam who was by then eight years old for an injunction against waste and devastation perpetrated on the land by what were described in the judgement as "the extraordinary activities of the Colclough family". A grant of land in Kildavin which Patrick of Anneville had acquired in 1806 was left to Patrick Sarsfield and his four sisters and in 1826 he granted a 19 year lease to his father, Sarsfield, on whose death it went to Patrick Sarsfield's youthful sons Adam and Vesey and the Encumbered Estates Court had the greatest difficulty in sorting out what had actually become of it.
When Patrick Sarsfield had gone away the Rossboroughs at Tintern resumed their happy existence until the death of Rossborough in 1869. They produced a family of four daughters- Louisa Mary Susannah born in 1848, Susannah Frances Julia in 1851, Mary Grey Wentworth in 1852 and Belinda Powell Leech Trumble in 1855. In 1872 Susannah Frances Julia married a John Lloyd whose descendants would seem to be heirs-at-law to the successful plaintiffs in Rossborough v Boyse, though their acquisition of the Colclough estates and heirlooms came about through the will of Susannah's niece who died in 1983.
On the death of Mrs Rossborough-Colclough in 1884 the whole estate passed to her eldest daughter Louisa Mary Susannah, a fact which quickly came to the notice of Franc Digby Biddulph. He was the scapegrace son of Francis Biddulph of Rathrobin, Queens County, and had early left home and gone to London where he is believed to have been married though no record of this can be found and if it did happen it must have been under an assumed name. He also joined the Middlesex militia in which in due course he attained the rank of captain though subsequently he preferred to describe himself as a captain in the Royal Fusiliers with which he had no association at all. Louisa Mary succumbed to his passionate wooing and considered his idea of a torch-light wedding at midnight in the ruined chapel at Tintern most romantic. The attraction from his point of view was that if his wife heard of it there could be no prosecution for bigamy since a lawful wedding had to be solemnised between daybreak and 3 p.m. in a place licensed for marriages by a person also duly licensed. Subsequently to satisfy doubts which had arisen in Louisa's mind they twice went through ceremonies of marriage in Dublin without objection being raised by any previous spouse of Biddulph's. Like three of his predecessors at Tintern Biddulph took the name and arms of Colclough by Royal Licence. Their first child, Caesar Franc Bickerstaff Plantagenet was born on 15 September 1886, and died in infancy, and the second, Lucy Wilmot Maria Susannah Biddulph was born in 1890.
After the birth of her daughter Louisa suffered from puerperal fever, and had a nervous breakdown, and was nursed in one of the rooms in the tower where she was kept locked up for the next five years. She was inclined to stoutness so Biddulph prescribed for her in her imprisonment a diet from which all fat and particularly butter was rigidly excluded, but she managed to survive. From the narrow slit windows of the tower she could see a rose bush and an apple tree, whose flowerings, fruitings and fallings were her only calendar. When on 13 July 1895 she was released with the glad tidings that Biddulph was dead her first demand was for a pound of butter which she proceeded to swallow neat.
At her birth Lucy Wilmot, generally called May, was put out to nurse in the cabin of one of the farm workers with whose own infant daughter she was brought up and who remained her constant companion until her death. During Louisa's imprisonment Biddulph had cohabited with one of the domestic staff. Ulick Sadleir believed this to have been his lawful wife who had connived at the torchlight ceremony and had been introduced into the Abbey immediately after it as housekeeper but this view is not accepted in the neighbourhood as she was a local girl whose identity is well recollected and who would almost certainly have had no opportunity of meeting and marrying Biddulph before his move to Tintern. Louisa survived her incarceration for seventeen years, dying in 1912, but her daughter May, notwithstanding the health hazards of life amongst the decomposing corpses by which she was surrounded in the Abbey lived to be over 90 though latterly she had moved out of the Abbey into the steward's house at Saltmills and then into a nursing home. On her death the heirs at law of the Rossboroughs were the Lloyd descendants of her aunt Susanna.
In addition to Vesey and the eccentric Adam with his troublesome progeny, the 'Great Caesar' of Duffry had seven other sons of whom four died young. One, a Caesar, served in the Hanoverian Legion and died unmarried, his life being otherwise unrecorded; the other two, the Rev. Thomas and Major Richard of the 7th Dragoons left behind them masses of information about their lives and doings but most of it is of little interest. Thomas was a very serious-minded and somewhat worldly clergyman who kept a censorious eye on his irresponsible kinsmen and as trustee of various family trusts and marriage settlements was never slow to petition the Chancery Court to make his fellow-trustees account. He married Florence, the daughter of the Hon. Bysshe Molesworth and had a son, Caesar, who died unmarried in 1792 a captain in the 36th Rgt., a son Charles about whom nothing is yet known, and a number of daughters. Richard of the 7th Dragoons was Town Major of Galway but there is some doubt as to what that appointment entailed; he was removed from it in June of 1800. He married Mary, daughter of Eltonhead O'Meara of Wexford and had four sons of whom the eldest, Caesar, married Elizabeth Harrington, was a captain in the 84th Rgt., and died without issue in 1835. The other three, Adam, Thomas, and Richard died unmarried- Thomas in America and Richard in Jamaica, where he was drowned in 1819. His daughter Frances married her cousin Bagenal of St Kieran's. They emigrated to Montgomery, Alabama, but left many descendants in the female line.
